Compliance monitoring has been employed in a wide range of industries or domains, including but not limited to, health care, financial institution, mining, manufacturing, construction and travel, etc. There has been an increasing demand to strengthen compliance monitoring due to heightened governmental regulations and/or health and safety requirements.
Event processing is a method of tracking and analyzing streams of events (things that take place) information, and deriving a conclusion. Various event processing solutions have been adopted to provide effective compliance monitoring.
Complex Event Processing (CEP) is an approach that continuously collects, processes and analyzes real-time data from multiple sources. It focuses on detecting a situation or a pattern, which can be a specific sequence of events, in continuous event streams. CEP provides a measure to identify meaningful events and respond to them as quickly as possible.
A CEP system, in general, evaluates queries over real-time event data, and assists derivation of intelligence to produce result without delay. CEP queries are distinctive from the regular Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. CEP queries process real time streaming data, while SQL queries process static tabular data in traditional database systems. Moreover, CEP queries are long standing queries that are submitted ahead of time, while SQL queries are instantaneous.
CEP applications define how events are processed and analyzed. Correspondingly, CEP technology has been implemented in various industries and services to deploy applications such as, for example, opportunity and risk analysis, behavior monitoring, fraud detection, and business process management. A compliance monitoring system can also take advantage of a CEP system.
Existing CEP-powered compliance monitoring solutions utilize Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) badges or other types of wearable monitoring devices, which can be read by sensors installed at locations of compliance interest. A centralized CEP engine is also required to track all event data transmitted from every individual RFID badge or wearable monitoring device, to run CEP compliance queries, to send compliance violation alerts to the badges and/or wearable monitoring devices, and to generate report of compliance status. The conventional technologies, thus, require setting up sensor infrastructures at the places where compliance monitoring is performed. However, installation of additional sensing infrastructure with subscription-based monitoring devices may be cost-prohibitive or impossible.
Moreover, a centralized CEP engine with a non-discriminating compliance violation alerting mechanism is facing ever growing challenges. On one hand, there are increasing privacy concerns that people become more and more reluctant to have compliance activities or violations monitored by and/or reported to a centralized server. On the other hand, people prefer not to have their compliance status publicly displayed. Moreover, there is a trend that more and more industries and businesses are embracing “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) initiatives that individuals are allowed to carry their personal devices to work. Therefore, there is a need to provide a context-aware privacy-preserving compliance solution that runs a CEP engine on individual's personal smart devices.